


my heart, on a noose

by goodmorningbeloved



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Fix-It, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, XMA spoilers, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 21:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7070047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorningbeloved/pseuds/goodmorningbeloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You must have noticed by now,” Jean says, posture rigid.</p><p>Charles glances at her inquisitively before his gaze is inevitably pulled back towards Erik, who is standing with Peter on the balcony, engaged in private conversation.</p><p>“That’s not him, Professor,” Jean says, voice strangely empty. “That’s not Erik.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart, on a noose

**Author's Note:**

> title from green day's _oh love_. its lyrics aren't that fitting, but the line's been stuck with me for a while and it felt right to use it as a title here
> 
> i think i've started to measure a movie's inspiration value by how many Fix-Its it drives me to create lmao so here's to my third one!! *clinks capri sun with myself*

Soft-haired and softer-eyed in the light of the morning, brushing a thumb curiously across Charles’s bottom lip, Erik says, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Charles, lying there beside him and feeling quite small, does not know how to tell him that it feels just like that. “I had a dream,” he says, dumbly.

Erik smiles, the kind that Charles only sees in private. When he sits up on the bed, sunlight fills the space he creates, and Charles’s fingers curl absently towards him. _I am still dreaming_ , Charles thinks to no one.

“Do you need a hand?” Erik asks when he has stood, hand stretched out.

Charles takes it but makes no move to rise, instead letting a small, amused smile play on his lips. He says, “That’s kind of you, but I’ve been able to do it myself for years.”

Erik smiles in return. There’s something off about it. “Of course.”

Charles leans back into the pillows, unable to move his gaze from Erik standing tall, standing firm, standing _here_. He turns Erik’s hand in his palm, lets their fingers fall and fill in the gaps of each other’s until they are properly intertwined. Charles tugs. “Let’s stay for a few more minutes.”

In this one, Erik stays.

 

 

 

The children are wary around him. Charles understands. 

He catches a few of them whispering in the halls, their eyes darting every so often to the door of Erik’s room. They straighten quickly when Charles approaches them, and the suspicion on their faces crumbles away to self-implicating guilt.

“It’s all right,” Charles tells them gently. “I understand this can be a confusing time, but—“

“He would have killed my family, professor,” one says. He looks unnervingly similar to the Alex Summers whom Charles first met twenty years ago, alive and youthful with a touch of rebellion.

“ _Apocalypse_ would have,” Charles says over a frown. “I don’t know what you’ve—“

“We should get to class.”

The children seldom interrupt him.

“All right,” Charles allows, hesitant.

As they leave, he reaches out to their minds, hoping to soothe any dissonant surface thoughts, but finds nothing at all. Absurd. Neither of them seem to notice his attempt, walking on down the hallway with heads bowed together, whispering again. The other boy, Charles notices belatedly, looks like Scott.

When he turns, the hallway is empty, and there is an absence of thoughts. _Classes,_ he tells himself, and when that reasons away the wisps of doubt in his mind, he begins to wheel himself to his next classroom. “Professor!” Jubilee exclaims when he enters the room. “We were beginning to worry, you were

 

 

 

distracted,” Erik says over steepled fingers and their chessboard.

“I’m thinking,” Charles says smoothly. _I was going to do something_ , he thinks. _What was I going to do?_

He moves his bishop up three spaces. In the next instant, Erik leans over the table, neatly plucking his white queen and placing it four spaces closer to Charles’s king, and says, not smugly, “Checkmate.”

“Well played, my friend,” Charles says, trying for a smile.

“You weren’t concentrating.”

Charles stares at him curiously. “You moved your piece with your hand.”

When it looks like Erik’s lips are parting for the beginning of an explanation, the door to the study opens with a soft creak and Raven takes a step in. “Charles,” she says, “the president’s on the phone.”

“Yes, yes.” He’s been expecting that call for days — weeks? — now, so he isn’t surprised, but he just wishes Raven would remember to knock. “Just let me and Erik finish—“

He stops, noticing that the seat in front of him is empty. The chessboard and its pieces stare back at him, as if they are all sharing a private joke.

“Charles?” Raven asks, taking another step in. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be there in a moment, Raven,” he tells her, feeling odd. “It’s rude to put the president on hold.”

She leaves, though her parting expression promises that this isn’t the last time Charles will hear of it. He lets her go, wishing he could tell what she is thinking, but her shields are strong, strong enough to make her mind feel like smooth concrete when Charles reaches out to it.

When he regards the chessboard again, he leans forward and moves the white queen four spaces closer to the black king and, when that is done, leaves the room trying to remember

 

 

 

what the mansion looked like before it became the school, when it was just his lonely little house. “She’s doing so well,” Charles murmurs, watching Jean’s hands moving, conducting wood and stone according to some music only she can hear. He says this to Scott — the _real_ Scott, he tells himself — who stands next to him. Together, they watch the mansion become more recognizable with each floor that is constructed.

“She’s amazing,” Scott agrees, fondness evident in his tone.

At that, Charles raises an eyebrow. He shifts to look at Scott, intending to give him a knowing grin, only to find Scott looking at him already.

“She’s under good guidance,” he says, gesturing to Erik, who hovers just a little ways from Jean.

Scott goes silent. “It isn’t real, Professor,” he says a while later, “you know that, right?” and Charles furrows his eyebrows and begins to ask why and

 

 

 

smiles at the sight of Erik walking away from Moira, thinking of the only other time he’s seen Erik in a suit: years ago, offering him _tea, vicar?_ and shooting him grins that sent something warm, pleasant, coiling in his stomach.

“This’ll be fun,” Erik mutters when he has rejoined Charles’s side, adjusting the cuffs of his suit restlessly.

“Moira will be there to monitor the interview,” Charles says by way of reassurance, “and I’ll be in the back of the room. If something goes awry…”

_Well, I’ll try to make sure nothing will,_ he finishes, and then he pushes that thought to Erik, but Erik is already walking away without so much as an acknowledgment that he heard Charles, and Charles calls out after him, an _Erik?_ with the mental equivalent of a brush of his hand against Erik’s wrist, and Erik does not reply to that, either.

Charles looks around bizarrely, and his mind, slow, foggy, takes a few moments to register the unusual silence of the conference room and

 

 

 

the smell of something cooking, bordering on burning. “Peter,” he begins warningly, wheeling into the kitchen, and that’s as far as he gets because the children are all suddenly swarming his vision, blank eyes crinkled by the force of their grins as they shout, “Surprise.”

Erik is there, just setting down two more plates and smiling in his own way, a dream framed by a human body. “They wanted to celebrate the repairs finally being finished.”

_They were finished weeks ago_ , Charles thinks dimly. The thought blinks away in the next second, and he is laughing when Kurt appears in front of him, holding a plate with a slice of cake sitting primly in the center. It feels good to laugh; it loosens something in his chest that feels like it’s been stuck since a beach in Cuba, and he would give anything to feel like this for the rest of his days.

“You should see it,” Erik says next to him, voice warm. “From the outside.”

And then the children are walking with him outside, where the sky is dark even though Charles could have sworn it was daylight when he first came into the kitchen, where Charles lets Erik help him down to the checkered blanket laid out beneath his favorite tree, where he sits with his cheek warm against Erik’s shoulder and they watch, together, the fireworks that Jubilee had claimed to have worked so hard on.

When Erik kisses him, it feels unreal, unfathomable, and yet there is his hand, the hand that could bend the earth under his will if he so chose, the hand that instead chooses to cup Charles’s cheek with the gentlest of touches.

“Thank you, Erik,” he murmurs, for things that extend beyond the act of rebuilding his home.

Erik leans their foreheads together, gray eyes unwavering, thumb smoothing small circles into Charles’s jaw. “Wake up, Charles,” he whispers. “You must

 

 

 

have noticed by now,” Jean says, posture rigid.

Charles glances at her inquisitively before his gaze is inevitably pulled back towards Erik, who is standing with Peter on the balcony, engaged in private conversation.

“That’s not him, Professor,” Jean says, voice strangely empty. “That’s not Erik.”

Charles feels a dull throbbing in his head. “Jean,” he says, tiredly, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, but please don’t start this again.”

“Well, someone has to say something,” she snaps. At the sudden, uncharacteristically sharp turn of her voice, Charles flinches and

 

 

 

straightens in his chair when Erik is suddenly pushed into his room, barely managing a chessboard, two glasses, and — wine? — in his arms.

“ _You_ fix this, Erik,” someone hisses, and Charles has no time to crane his neck and try to catch a glimpse of who they are before the door is slammed shut, leaving him and Erik alone.

“Charles,” Erik says. “Have time for a game?”

Charles spares a single glance at the pile of papers to be graded, and then, without another moment of hesitation, wheels himself from behind the desk. _For you, anything_ , he says; out loud, he says, “As long as the wine’s for me.”

They set up in front of the fireplace as they had many times before. It’s an easy game tonight, and Charles finds his thoughts light even as Erik captures the last of his pawns. There’s a dreamlike quality to the night, as if someone has placed this moment within the borders of a photograph and then held it over a candle, casting a warm, soft glow to the reality.

Reality.

Charles finishes his second of glass of wine halfway through their fourth game, and before they can begin their fifth, he says quietly, “You should get some rest.”

The fire burns, he notes, but there is no crackling, no sound except Erik’s voice.

“We’ve stayed up later.”

“You have a long trip tomorrow, don’t you?” He places the wine glass noiselessly on the table before leaning back in his chair. “Now that the mansion is fully rebuilt.”

Erik’s eyes are unreadable, and Charles is wishing he could tell what he’s thinking when Erik says, “Stand up.”

His first reaction is to chuckle, but then Erik stands and walks over to his side, offering a hand, no traces of humor in his expression.

Charles keeps his eyes fixed on him as he takes his hand. Erik places it on his shoulder instead and Charles understands, holding on as Erik lifts him out of the chair the way Charles had seen his stepfather once lift his mother on their wedding day. Erik’s body is a solid presence against his, strong and sure and there in the way the sun’s place is irrefutably in the sky, and Charles finds himself sliding his hand up Erik’s shoulder to cradle the back of his neck.

“Ask me to stay, Charles,” Erik says, softly.

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

Erik’s eyes are honest.

Charles smiles but he looks away, moves his hand back to Erik’s shoulder. “You can put me down now, please.”

Erik understands that he doesn’t mean in his chair. With a small, “careful,” he is bending down slightly and letting Charles lower his feet to the floor.

Charles stands.

“This is a dream, isn’t it,” he says. This does not surprise him, nor does it profoundly devastate him, but it does send something wrenching its way through his ribcage and sidling up next to his heart. Charles thinks it’s love.

“I needed you to wake up,” Erik says, and if Charles listens closely he might think that Erik sounds a little sad too.

He nods once. “I understand.”

“Charles,” Erik says, voice thick.

“It’s all right, my friend,” Charles tells him, and he means every word of it as he finds Erik’s hand and guides it to his own cheek, lets his warm fingers brush over his temple, lets it be his point of concentration as he reaches somewhere inside of him and finds the will to

 

 

 

 

 

open his eyes to the aftermath of a battle.

Erik’s helmet is the first thing he becomes aware of, smooth and unyielding where it sits by his thigh, just touching his knuckles.

And then, someone’s voice, coming from somewhere above him and accompanied by someone else stroking his cheek: “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

The world returns in soft pulses of light and color, his vision slowly filling in the dark spots with familiar faces: Hank supporting Peter, Raven’s deepset frown, Moira’s cloudy expression, Jean’s faraway eyes. It’s Peter who’s spoken.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Charles rasps, amused, and it’s addressed to all of them but he is looking at Erik.

“Of sorts," Erik returns quietly. There is a pause before he asks: “Did your legs finally give it away?”

The dream, he means. Charles smiles serenely up at Erik, who is soft-haired and softer-eyed even in the light of the troubled sky. “No,” he says, and the ruins of Egypt witness him answer simply, without accusation: “It was you saying yes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Was the possibility of me staying,” Erik says, days later, when he is standing between him and the doors of the mansion, "so impalpable that it brought you out of that mental stupor?"

There's a joke somewhere there. Charles gives a small laugh. "You underestimate your effect on me, Erik."

Erik smiles thinly and says, "And you, yours." They are no more than days older from the world's almost-destruction and likely no more wiser, but the way his mind silently seeks permission at the gates of Charles's says that something has changed - even though those gates haven't been closed for a long, long time. 

 _Ask me again_ , Erik says.

Charles tilts his head at him. _Would you?_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this one, Erik does.


End file.
